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Market Trends & Analysis Standards Emerging Tech

AV-over-IT, Unplanned Obsolescence, and Unintended Consequences

AV-over-IP is reshaping more than signal routing - it's quietly dismantling the engineering workforce that built broadcast and professional AV from the ground up. As facilities trade dedicated technical staff for IT generalists and swap capital hardware investments for disposable commodity gear, the industry faces a reckoning few are openly discussing. Whether this shift delivers genuine efficiency or simply trades deep expertise for short-term savings remains an open and urgent question.

Pete Putman •
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Events & Trade Shows Market Trends & Analysis HDTV Broadcasting

NAB 2019: Where Does It Go From Here?

Twenty-five years of NAB Show attendance offers a striking vantage point: enormous hardware booths have shrunk, tape has vanished, and software now rules a floor once dominated by six-figure broadcast gear. Attendance dropped 11.6% in two years, and the show's identity feels uncertain. Yet 8K cameras from Sony, Sharp, Ikegami, and others signal where professional video is heading, with the 2020 Olympics poised to accelerate adoption in ways few anticipated.

Pete Putman •
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DRM Streaming HD Blu-ray

UltraViolet: Gone, And Best Forgotten

UltraViolet's shutdown announcement nearly vanished unnoticed into a spam folder - a fitting metaphor for a service most users had already abandoned. The digital content locker promised seamless access to purchased movies across devices, but its clunky registration process drove customers straight to Netflix and Amazon Prime instead. With major studios already gone and 30 million largely inactive accounts, its quiet death reveals how quickly even well-funded digital ecosystems can become irrelevant. The real question is what that means for today's streaming services.

Pete Putman •
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Emerging Tech Market Trends & Analysis Standards

HPA Tech Retreat 2019: 8K Is Here, Ready Or Not…

8K television is arriving faster than the industry can support it. Supply chain decisions in Asia are driving Chinese fabs to mass-produce 8K panels, anticipating five million shipments by 2022, yet critical pieces remain missing: lenses, display interfaces, codecs, and content are all lagging behind. AI-powered upscaling may bridge the gap temporarily, but the deeper question raised at HPA Tech Retreat 2019 challenges whether chasing pixel counts is even the right priority anymore.

Pete Putman •
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Events & Trade Shows 4K Ultra HD Market Trends & Analysis

CES 2019 In the Rear View Mirror

CES 2019 delivered a striking reminder of how far display technology has traveled since plasma giants and upscaling DVD players ruled the show floor. Eight-K televisions from LG, Samsung, Sony, Sharp, and a wave of Chinese brands dominated booths, while AI-powered processors scaled standard-definition content with jaw-dropping results. Mini-LED backlights, collapsing TV prices, and near-field wireless technology at 96 gigabits per second signal where home entertainment is heading next.

Pete Putman •
Columns
HDMI Standards 4K Ultra HD

HDMI 2.1 Update – Pretty Much Status Quo

HDMI 2.1 arrived with a quantum leap in bandwidth - jumping from 18 Gb/s to a stratospheric 48 Gb/s - yet a New York press conference revealed surprisingly little new ground. Packet-based signaling, DSC compression, and Socionext chipsets are moving the standard forward, but optical support remains absent and manufacturer adoption stays murky. With 8K TVs hitting shelves and high frame rate video looming, the real test comes at CES.

Pete Putman •
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HD DVR OTA Set-Top Boxes (STBs) OTA HD & Antennas

Useful Gadgets: TiVo BOLT OTA

Twenty years of TiVo loyalty culminates in a hands-on look at the Bolt OTA, a cord-cutter's DVR that pairs four tuners and a robust streaming app lineup with the iconic program guide that made TiVo a household verb. Setup is refreshingly simple compared to the CableCard era, and 4K output plus MoCA-connected Mini VOX support add genuine modern muscle. Whether the channel scan results and real-world performance justify cutting the cable bill entirely is where things get interesting.

Pete Putman •
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Projection HD Home Theater Market Trends & Analysis

R.I.P For Home Theater Projectors?

Falling flat-screen prices are quietly threatening home theater front projection's survival. With 85-inch Ultra HD displays now matching decade-old projector prices, and 8K panels from Samsung and LG arriving faster than anyone anticipated, the case for keeping a projector and screen grows harder to justify. Micro-LED advances in commercial cinemas hint at where home displays are heading next, and the trajectory points toward a future where projectors become nostalgic relics.

Pete Putman •
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OTA HD & Antennas HDTV Broadcasting DTV Transition

Spectrum Repacking and Channel Scans

Spectrum repacking is reshaping over-the-air television as the FCC squeezes remaining broadcasters into tighter frequency bands. Stations are going dark, sharing channels, and leaning on stat muxing and adaptive bitrate encoding to survive the transition. NBC, Telemundo, and local independents are already consolidating signals in Philadelphia, New York, and the Lehigh Valley. OTA viewers who skip regular channel scans risk staring at dead air without knowing why - and the reshuffling is far from over.

Pete Putman •
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HDTV Broadcasting OTA HD & Antennas Market Trends & Analysis

Goodbye, Quality?

Over-the-air HD broadcasting is changing fast, and not always for the better. The FCC's spectrum auction forced dozens of stations off their channels, pushing broadcasters into shared multiplexes where bit rates have plummeted from 14 Mb/s to as low as 3 Mb/s for HD content. Philadelphia's UHF band tells the story clearly - ten dark channels, four stations crammed onto a single VHF carrier. Whether ATSC 3.0 can rescue broadcast quality before viewers stop caring is the real question.

Pete Putman •
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OTA Set-Top Boxes (STBs) Streaming HD OTA HD & Antennas

Useful Gadgets – Channel Master Stream+ OTA/OTT Media Player

Channel Master's Stream+ defies the traditional set-top box mold with its compact, puck-like design that blends over-the-air reception with Android TV streaming. Supporting HDMI 2.0, HDCP 2.2, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, and codecs including HEVC H.265, this diminutive sidecar tuner punches well above its size. Voice control works smoothly for streaming navigation, though OTA channel switching via voice has quirks worth knowing before you buy.

Pete Putman •
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Blu-ray Market Trends & Analysis Streaming HD

Blu-Ray: On The Endangered Species List?

Physical media is losing ground fast. Ultra HD Blu-ray players are selling at roughly two units per hundred 4K TVs purchased, while streaming subscriptions surpass 100 million worldwide and codec advances keep closing the quality gap. Futuresource projects global Blu-ray player shipments will shrink from 72 million to 68 million by 2023. Whether disc-based formats can survive a market increasingly defined by broadband delivery and disposable hardware is a question worth examining closely.

Pete Putman •
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OTA HD & Antennas Consumer Education Budget HD

Product Review: Channel Master SMARTenna+ Indoor TV Antenna

Cord-cutting keeps gaining ground, and combining free over-the-air broadcasts with streaming remains the smartest move a viewer can make. Channel Master's SMARTenna+ takes a familiar thin-panel indoor antenna design and adds active electronics that scan for signals, then build seven distinct antenna patterns per channel. After two decades of antenna testing, this reviewer found something genuinely impressive: one indoor antenna that finally delivers CBS, NBC, and Fox simultaneously without dropout. The full performance data tells an interesting story.

Pete Putman •
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Events & Trade Shows Emerging Tech Market Trends & Analysis

InfoComm 2018 In The Rear View Mirror

InfoComm 2018 delivered two unavoidable themes: LED displays dominating every corner of the Las Vegas Convention Center and AV-over-IT reshaping signal distribution. Yet beneath those headlines, sharper conversations emerged around 8K video tiling, voice-controlled AV systems demanding two-factor authentication, and 5G networks threatening to upend wireless connectivity as we know it. Our industry is accelerating toward changes that will redefine how professionals design, install, and secure audiovisual systems in the coming decade.

Pete Putman •
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Standards Calibration LCD TVs

Measuring Up With DisplayHDR

HDMI has dominated display connections for 16 years, but VESA's DisplayPort quietly outpaces it on bandwidth, color depth, and royalty-free accessibility. Now VESA is pushing harder with DisplayHDR certification - a rigorous, numbers-driven standard for HDR and wide color gamut on LCD monitors that makes the UHD Alliance's TV requirements look embarrassingly lax. Whether DisplayHDR can finally shift market momentum away from HDMI's consumer stranglehold is the real question worth watching.

Pete Putman •
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